dv7-4065dx won't boot?

[MinaTheEMT]

I hope yall can help, or at least point me in the proper direction!  

Last night my husband was merrily using his laptop playing farmville or whatever nonsense he does. He left it alone for like 5 minutes to go eat a sammich, and when he returned it was frozen.  He shut it down the hard way (held the power button until it turned off) and now it just... refuses to boot.  

If you turn it on and don't press any buttons, it says something to the effect of "Windows failed to start. Do you want to run startup repair (recommended) or start windows normally?" 

If you choose  "start windows normally", then windows tries to load, restarts and the process repeats itself.  If you choose "startup repair" a bar pops up at the bottom that says "Windows is loading files" and then it hangs at a very pretty blue screen.  Not the BSOD, but a nice pretty blue screen that would be lovely if only the bloody computer actually worked.  The little mouse pointer is on the screen, and I can move the mouse around, but nothing ever happens. I'm not sure I can manage to convince my husband that this blue screen is some new farmville feature, so this just won't work for me.  Here is a picture of the blue screen of awesomeness: http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v206/BlindInTheMire/IMG_20110830_170410.jpg  

The computer does this with no disk in the drive, AND with recovery disk 1 in the drive. This thing is more defiant than an angry teenager. (It is 1 year old, is that "teenage" in computer years? It must be)

Now that we have established that booting it up normally won't work. I tried pushing buttons.  I tried f11, and it brought me back to the "windows is loading files" screen, ultimately leading to the blue screen of awesomeness, where I can do nothing except move the mouse pointer around. 

I tried f9 with the recovery disk in it, told the computer to boot off of the cd/dvd drive, and again, it hangs at the BSOA (blue screen of awesomeness. I don't know if that is this screen's "technical" term, but that's what I am rolling with.) 

Is there some magical button combination or.. something I can do to get this $800 paper weight working again?  All humour aside, I hope someone can at least point me in the proper direction. My husband REALLY loves his farmville. 

[DavidPK]

Hi,

My wife is pretty keen on that game too

Try the following.

Shutdown the notebook.  Tap away at f10 as you start the notebook to enter the bios menu.  Under the Advanced or Diagnostic tab you should find the facility to run tests on both the Hard Drive and Memory.  Post back with the details of any error messages.

Regards,

DP-K

[MinaTheEMT]

Primary Hard Disk Self Test:   

Hard Disk 1 Quick (303) 

Memory Test: 

Memory Test Pass

[DavidPK · Accepted solution]

Hi,

Well at least that's found the problem, the Hard Drive is failing and will need to be replaced.  If your notebook is under warranty, contact HP to have this replaced. 

If you live in the US, contact HP Here.

If you are in another part of the world, start Here.

If you're out of warranty and would like a guide on replacing this yourself ( it's a straight forward process ), please let me know.

Regards,

DP-K

[MinaTheEMT]

I did a quick google search after I posted that. That's what I was afraid of  

That brings me to my (hopefully) final question, kind sir. Assuming I run down to the local best buy and pick up a hard drive for it - I do have the recovery disks for this massive paper weight. Will that be enough to get it going again? Or do I need to pick up a copy of windows while I am there? 

And I do appreciate your help!

[DavidPK]

Hi,

You're welcome

Yes, you have everything you need to get up and running.

Just for referrence, the drive on the link below is an example of one that would be fine for your notebook.

500Gb Hard Drive

The procedure to replace the Primary Hard Drive starts on Page 47 of your Maintenance & Service Guide.

Once done, simply use your Recovery DVDs to reinstall the Operating System on the new drive.  These will also reinstall all the original software that was bundled with your notebook as well as re-creating the Recovery Partition on the new drive.

All the best,

DP-K

[Pav_dv7_4073nr]

I have a similar notebook and similar problem. After shutting down in between updates by holding the power button down, my OS Windows 7 home premium never booted again. 

First errors were;301, 303, 305......ok, new hardrive installed. Ordered set of hp Recovery disks 3 + 1 update driver disc. 

Loaded the 3 disks and countless times I received the same msg; BASE15.WIM Can not copy from D: bvdvd to C: Local disc.

After two 8 hr phone conversations with hp phone support it was decided I had a bad set of disks.....New ones arrive and same story.

Bought new Hybrid SS/7200RPM 500G Seagate and installed.  I Researched Cyberlink hp Recovery Utility boot Patch. Instructs that a known issues with installing Win7 on this hp Pavilion dv7 4073nr.  Same msg and Restart with msg bootmanager missing.  I can see the files have landed on the C: drive and X:Boot has been established with only 28mb of space however. The BASE15,WIM file is missing. There is 14, then 16??? don't know what the BASE15.WIM does but I suspect it has something to do with the bootmanager.

Does anyone know if the BitLocker drive encription could be locking me out of installing or booting up?  How about the Drivegaurd that detects differences in forces that I assume locks down the hard drive to save the disk from devasting scratches.

I need help!!!! 

I seem to have good hardware.  I have new OS disks and repair and recovery disks that I made the day I bought it.  I used the cyberlink patch. Tried all the tricks...1 stick Ram, without battery, flashing the BIOS, tried booting from Norton Ghost, 360, Recovery manager, dragging files to drives like bootfix and other drivers.  I even loaded full image backup 32G onto C: and the recovery mngr does not recongnize it because its not the correct type of file. IE:.Svi or .vsi or whatever.  It is a backup from the laptop to the external drive for a FULL backup.

Any Ideas friends? I am 4 months out of warrenty and already almost $400 into this silly OS install. PS. I can take back at least one of the drives I bought. I think I will keep the Hybrid, super fast~~~~~